I was looking thru my system (btw, Bubba, no crashes since you helped me to uninstall the HP garbage...guess that was the problem), and came across my page file.
It's set at 2046. under xp 32, the max it lists that I can set the pf to is: 4092.
I have 6gb of RAM, but xp only sees 3gb, and I have lots of HD room.
I tried that Krom and Descent3 kept throwing up memory errors. Another problem I ran into with Win7 64 bit was running Descent3 from a shortcut. Would not run unless I ran the exe from the install folder.
It isn't unheard of for some games / programs to require some virtual memory even if the system has enough physical memory to get away without using any virtual memory. About the only way to find out is to try.